What Will I Do?
If you were to...
Focus on Natural Resources Education and Extension...
Potential PCMI Research/Project topics in this program could be: community education; teacher and/or youth education; college or university education; eco-tourism education.
Focus on Social Forestry (a.k.a Forest Social Science)...
Students would be encouraged to pick up some very basic research methodology skills, e.g. Participatory action research, participatory mapping, basic interviewing, household survey techniques, case study approaches, etc. A tool kit of useful research techniques before heading overseas to pursue very applied, outreach–type projects in support of the work in the Peace Corps assignment.
If you are engaged in home fuel projects (fuelwood plantings, stove efficiency, etc), you might train villagers to collect data on fuel use, availability, cost, acceptability, etc. This sort of research is unlikely to be rocket science, but might be very useful locally. Program assessment would be another useful focus for research project. All kinds of inventory work could be useful. Case studies of successful and unsuccessful development efforts as well.
Focus on Forest Economics...
Work on "concept of study", theoretical model, testable hypotheses, local data collection.
Students who are in the field for the Peace Corps are in a unique position to understand how communities make decisions about resource use, how they deal with risk, how they interact with broader management regulations (like parks), and other issues that are fundamental to creating policies that work to improve natural resource management and reduce poverty.
Students working with professor Heidi Albers, forest economist, might be expected to develop concepts/frameworks about the tradeoffs and institutions involved in resourcemanagement where they are working, to pass that information on to me at regular intervals (every few months), and to develop sets of parameters that reflect different situations (different villages, different villagers within a village, different regions, etc.). Projects might culminate in understanding farmer decisions, interactions with protected areas, ecotourism, infrastructure and market access, rural family time allocation between resource management and other activities, and other such issues surrounding rural welfare and resource management/access.
Focus on Silviculture...
There are many opportunities to evaluate: 1) the impact of traditional silvicultural techniques on forests and their ecosystem services (and how they are used) in a given location; 2) the connections among such traditional techniques and agroforestry, straight agriculture, and/or social pressures on the land (e.g., population, land tenure, and gender issues); and 3) the development of alternative silvicultural approaches in response to the above.
Focus on Forest Products and International Marketing...
Related to Peace Corps work in a local scale, the most likely connection would be in local market development issues. However, any number of marketing (business management) related topics could be feasibly undertaken.
Focus on Forest Ecology...
Students in the science-intensive programs in our College receive rigorous training to understand ecosystem processes deeply and broadly. Their training gives them a strong basis for conducting environmental assessments and solving environmental problems scientifically. As a Peace Corps MI student, you would be able to help communities design studies to learn for themselves the environmental impacts of their actions, and they would be able to help them develop environmentally sound solutions to problems.
Working with Professor Barbara Bond, for example, you might provide an environmental assessment of plantations of trees that are exotic to the region where they are planted.